Nalates Urriah

Going through the 2014 to 2022 outfits and finding places to photo the dresses.

There is RAM DRive software, some free, selling for US$30 that handles the saving of the RAM Drive at shutdown and reloading it at startup. No user attention is needed once set up. While SSDs can be fast, the motherboard can bottleneck them. The PCIe bus has to support all the devices using it. A video card uses a lot of PCIe channels. Other devices do also. Hard drives and SSDs are using the channels. The older boards were designed for the video card to be the only high-speed channel needed. The rest were designed to handle hard drives and their data rates. So often an SSD is handled at HD speeds by the motherboard. New boards have more and faster channels for SSDs. RAM drives are magnitudes faster than SSDs.

You haven't told us how you use SL. So none of the suggestions can be particularly specific. Those people that are especially tech-savvy will be in the tech section of this forum. Ask there and provide more information about what you want to do in SL, you'll get some specific answers. Intel processors are my choice. The title for best gaming CPU bounces between AMD and Intel. It is hard to keep up and know who is in the lead today. But, whichever one you buy, the other will soon be in the lead. Intel makes i3, i5, i7, and i9 CPUs and some other more exotic special-use CPUs. For gamers, the i5 is the sweet spot in performance and cost. For SL the i5 has enough parallel processing cores to be better than adiquit. The i7 and i9 are on the overkill side of things. While you might see a measurable, with a stopwatch, bit of improvement over an i5 it usually is not enough to justify the additional cost. Understand. If you turn the viewer's setting up and extend the draw-distance to max you can bring an i9 down to single-digit frame rates. So to get the best price and performance you gotta be a geek. I am trying to make the point that throwing money at the computer will not necessarily get you good performance in an SL viewer. I think the two most important factors for performance are CPU speed, faster is better, thus eliminating most laptops, and memory, which also needs to be fast and plentiful which requires a fast motherboard... see how quickly it geeks out? I consider 32GB a minimum. For max performance, you need a RAM Drive, a virtual storage system that lives in computer RAM and pretends to be a hard drive or SSD. This means you'll want 64GB of RAM or more. A dedicated video card is a must for performance. I prefer NVIDIA as they have provided better support for OpenGL, which SL viewers run on. Tom's Hardware and other geeky places give you the latest on computer hardware for gamers and recommend what is needed in a gaming computer.

No... but you can email or ping a Linden and ask. I suspect a vacation... @Patch Linden any info Patch?

It's a Torley-mobile..............

There are various ways to pose in SL. Black Dragon has a Poser that I think is the best in SL. The problem is only you can see the pose. PoseAnywhere makes a HUD that can be used to pose people or yourself. It uses SL poses. So it is not freestyle as it only uses poses available in SL (those you buy or make). Strawberry Linden long ago, pre-Linden, published a blog and gave posing style, and camera tips. It is still online. The tips are here.

You've done well. You have made an adorable face. Derailing... requires more than one person... Your wearing white in a vineyard works well for us. You look good. We don't have to do your laundry.

Well... it's so obvious... 😛 ...not. My helipad...

Well yeah... I mean wearing heels in the sand...

There are various types of motion blur. In one the subject is mostly unblurred and the background is blurred. In another type, the subject is blurred and the background is unblurred. In another, both are blurred but the leading edges of the subject are unblurred. In computer game graphics the software is doing things to avoid blur as the camera sweeps across a scene. So capturing blur in-world (SL) is difficult. I tend to use one image for all types. All unblurred. Then take the subject parts of the image I want to blur or keep focused then copy them to separate layers. Often more than one copy and layer. Then say I want a blurred background and a blurred runner with focused/unblurred leading edges. I'll blur the lower layer of the runner, usually more than the background. I may duplicate that layer so the blur is more dense. Then with a soft brush, I'll paint out the trailing edges of the runner (alpha layer) in the top layer. In some cases, I'll paint in an additional blur of the highlights. Also, things like wheels often need attention to look realistic. So a circular blur. Then a motion blur. Depending on lighting and desired effect I may put some motion blur behind or on top of the wheel with the circular blur. Once you get the idea and learn what your editor will do it becomes a matter of patience and determination. Some of the really great images I like took the artist day or weeks. All photo editing is basic techniques you combine to make your image. Motion blur is just a type of blur. Learning to use blur is the basic tech. I like these two artists' tutorials for advanced techniques; https://www.youtube.com/@natsumixenga9384 https://www.youtube.com/@NemanjaSekulic

There is an 'Introduce Yourself" thread.... somewhere. I've seen it. But how new users are supposed to find it, I have no idea. Welcome to SL. Do NOT put much effort into figuring out what you are SUPPOSED to do. Do what seems reasonable and/or fun. Be kind and polite. Avoid the jerks... yeah block/mute. Explore and experiment. There is more to see and do than you'll ever get around to.

Black Dragon takes some getting used to. I have trouble controlling the environment with BD. But there are added features not available in other viewers. So... it is mostly worth the effort.

Today in the LL lead UG Server/Sim/Scripting meeting it was announced the Friend's List fixes are rolling out on all the RC channels this week.

In a cancel culture era where the home office of LL is in the capital of Wokism, it is a rational concern.

Probably. But I doubt anyone takes the "today" all that seriously. I know I very rarely get an image into the forum that I took the day I post. I suspect many of the others are doing the same.

Some of the newer dance machines seem to be better at positioning avatars. Pic taken at Toby's.

Translation: what could it be??? I've already seen the pierced body of the avatar three times - some large yellow pieces and black sharp sticks - in the body - through, appears after teleport. Also, how can other people turn things on and off for me?? alpha, ears, how do they have access? after collision or teleportation. Sculpties and mesh can do this if they have not been fully rendered. The delay is usually in the download. Time usually corrects the problem. Sculpties contain their vertex positions in an image file. All images in SL are JPEG2000. In this format, there are multiple images. The low-resolution images load and render first. The sculpty completes rendering when the final Hi-Def image downloads. On occasion, the servers and viewer will get a bit confused and the viewer seems to think it has the whole sculpty-map-image downloaded when it doesn't, and the render stalls. Mesh will do a similar thing. All mesh in SL must have multiple models, LOD models 4 of them. The viewer asks for the LOD model it needs, then loads the others as needed. When something happens to throw the download sequence off, the item may mis-render. I have a couple of mesh attachments that from time to time mis-render when I TP to a different region. When entering a new region the server is making sure it is providing the right info to the viewer for rendering. There is a lot to go wrong in a region crossing. I think you are seeing the result. So often you can go out to another region and then come back and all is well. Sometimes an avatar re-bake or attachment refresh will solve the problem. Sometimes one has to relog. People can ONLY control your appearance when you are using RLV. However, they may see you differently depending on how well their system is downloading things.

Dancing at Toby's

Well.... a couple of days ago...

I was. Some temptations I cannot pass up... As musichero pointed out, AI like ChatGPT requires massive computational power and access to all the data available across the internet. The robots that we saw in iRobot with Will Smith would currently only be possible if they were connected to a massive data center, which is where their actual "thinking" would happen. The bot we see would be more like our computer screen. The actual computer is not the screen. For months news stories and posts have been appearing about their experiences with AI and their presentation of empirical evidence to show AI is LIVE and thinking on its own... or inhabited by demons attempting to manipulate people... Do a Google or DDG search in NEWS to see some of the wild ideas people have. This is the "Pluto is or is not a planet" conundrum. We are still arguing about whether viruses are alive or not.

OK? Well, I am concerned about what your children look like...

I agree to a point. But, even the old Elisa chat program would come up with novel combinations that presented new concepts. I suspect AI is doing enough of that to alarm those working with it. Not having good definitions of what is live or self-aware leaves room for developers to misunderstand what they are seeing.

Interesting perspectives. I do notice people talking about what AI is going to do. The actuality is, it will do what the programmers set it up to do. The information push is that AI will be able to think for itself. The benefit of that thinking is no one looks at those controlling AI, just the AI. But, as musichero pointed out, there are settings to control how the AI responds. You can see how Microsoft and Google have set limits on what their AI units will say. People are testing Bart and ChatGPT in the political arena. Asking AI to write about Biden and Trump. You can try it yourself and start to AI has interesting biases and PC limits. The big problem with AI is who controls it.